Technocrat Pitroda's Twitter press conference fails to impress

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor made the medium popular among politicians, the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj used it to air her thoughts, and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi started the trend of “trending”.

It was just a matter of time till the government would wake up to leveraging the power of Twitter to reach out to the people. And who better to lead the charge than Sam Pitroda?

India’s best-known technocrat, who ushered in India’s telecom revolution during Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, took to the micro-blogging site on Tuesday to conduct the first ever press conference by a government functionary.

Digital guru: Sam Pitroda conducted the first ever Indian press conference on Twitter

Before Pitroda, a key adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, logged on at the appointed time of 3.30 pm, the issue went viral — trending furiously for several hours as netizens hailed the innovative approach by the digital czar.

During the 45-minute interaction that followed, Pitroda — whose handle is @pitrodasam — picked up more than 500 new followers as he tweeted some 70 times.

But the twitterati, used to the candid comments of tweeters such as Omar Abdullah and Digvijaya Singh, were left disappointed with his monosyllabic answers.

Pitroda chose a vaguely titled theme — Democratisation of Information — to interact and uploaded a three-minute clip on YouTube talking about the theme.

History in the making: A photo on Pitroda's Facebook page shows him during the Twitter session

Using the hashtag #DoI, Pitroda set the tone of his interaction with opening remarks typical of a news conference. “UPA Govt has various plans to build robust Information Infrastructure to democratise information on a scale that has never been done before,” one of his inaugural tweets said.

The twitterati weren’t dampened by his bureaucratic style. Many questioned Pitroda about why the government was so sensitive to censoring criticism and blocking information.

He replied: “Certain sensitive information will have to be controlled by the government.”

Pitroda kept referring the questioners to various websites run by his team. “I believe that the NKN is a game changer and is going to revolutionise the way we #connect, #collaborate and deliver #education,” he said while talking about his initiative national knowledge network (NKN).

As Pitroda kept on using abbreviations, most of the participants were left hunting for their meaning.

“I just hope an average citizen is able to understand what PII, NKN, RTI and #DoI mean and how they can utilise them!” a participant tweeted.

“Apart from RTI and #DoI, all other words have made me search Google frantically!” replied another.

He talked about the initiatives already underway for computerisation of courts and pilot projects on panchayat connectivity.

Soon the participants realised that Pitroda was picking up easy questions and talking about existing programmes.

While Pitroda was impressed with the number of participants and promised more such interactions in the future, a netizen summed up the interaction thus: “As per tweets of @pitrodasam, everything in India is rosy.”